Mahalo for searching

If it's not an algorithm doing your search, what else is there? How about people. Mahalo bills itself as "human-powered search." It's from Webrepreneur Jason Calacanis and, according to this Fast Company article, is backed by "...$20 million in venture capital from a bevy of blue-chip investors--Sequoia Capital (original backer of Yahoo and Google); News Corp.; CBS; maverick Mark Cuban; and Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal..." Basically Mahalo is a series of hand-culled directories for popular search terms. If they haven't put together a page for your term yet, they politely reroute you to Google. Mahalo even accepts -- and pays for -- user-created directories via the Mahalo Greenhouse.

And just what does "Mahalo" mean? It's Hawaiian for thank you. The Hawaiian lexicon also gave the Web the word wiki, which means fast. (The tram at the Honolulu airport is called a wikiwiki.) Now only if someone would come up with the online equivalent of the pu-pu platter.